Education: Parnassus, Coast to Coast

What does it mean to be an intellectual in the U.S.? Is he really in
such an unhappy plight as he sometimes thinksthe ridiculed
double-dome, the egghead, the wild-eyed, absent-minded man who is made
to feel an alien in his own country?

Ever since World War II, U.S. intellectuals have, as never before, been
debating these questions. But in the course of the debate, one note has
been struck time and time again, and no one has sounded it more clearly
than Historian Jacques Barzun of Columbia University. If there is a...